Wednesday, July 15, 2009

In yet another Twitterific installment of live-blogging sessions at the Leeds Congress, I give you my Twitter posts from yesterday [Tuesday], when I attended the second session sponsored by the Mearcstapa group [Monsters: The Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory and Practical Application] and the Glasgow Centre for Medieval & Renaissance Studies:

This extended to the sphere of civil government. From romance [hagiography] to the political sphere, so to speak. Literature provided models of resistance. [about 20 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Waldensians, and Cathars, for example, could emulate the steadfastness of the saints. [about 20 hours ago from Twitterrific]

The use of real torture against heretics only reinforced their symbolic/real connections to early martyrs that they themselves claimed. [about 20 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Abuses of the actual legal rules on torture only further emboldened the populace in its distrust of judicial authority. [about 20 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Kat is drawing upon Daniel Baraz's work on medieval cruelty, which really is excellent work. [about 20 hours ago from Twitterrific]

And now Justin Noetzel on doorways as contested spaces in Beowulf and in medieval Scandinavian literature. [about 20 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Begins by recounting a saga ghost story about a woman in the larder--a ghost--who served food to visitors who were not treated well by the hosts. [about 20 hours ago from Twitterrific]

The doorway in this literature possesses power. This is related to ancient folktales where the door represents the last line of human defense against the outside world, including monsters. [about 20 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Since both humans and monsters possess houses with doors, they serve as uncanny doubles to each other. [about 20 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Do these doorways represent a form of nostalgia for a convivial domesticity that is always an object of violence and destruction? [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

The victory of the good guy is always uncertain in these fights that take place in domestic spaces. Hence, the grappling and wrestling [intimate/extimate combat in intimate spaces]. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

These struggles are physically intimate: Justin now narrates Grettir's fight with the troll/ghost Glaumr, and of course Beowulf's two Grendelkin fights. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

But we should be cautious in equating all of Beowulf's fights to each other, or to Grettir's. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

This and other treatises like it purported to describe women's secret body parts/areas that were technically "out of bounds" and monstrous but also peculiarly attractive. E. Grosz: women's bodies encapsulate modes of seepage. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Women's bodies, similar to other monstrous bodies, escaped normal boundary markers-- they could not be contained. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Commentators A and B go further and even accuse women of sometimes mutilating themselves with iron instruments in order to bleed from the inside and thereby poison their genitals and sexual partners. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

These hysterical responses/reactions to women's bodies is a reaction to the abjection of ALL bodies and subjectivities, and maternal bodies especially threaten the splitting of the self [pace Kristeva]. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

And therefore, in these treatises, what is most familiar [our bodies, and even our mothers' bodies] becomes, by a strange conversion, monstrous: the monster is YOU. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Q and A: Mary Kate Hurley asks Justin if a doorway says that, on the outside, is chaos. Invokes role of Janus on Roman doorways. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Mary Kate: Is the classical figure of chaos a kind of precursor to later medieval monsters? [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Some really interesting dialogue with Sarah on abjection and whether or not we can ever say we could be BEFORE or after abjection. Likely not. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Julie Orlemanski asks Kat if torture was less of a problem in England than on the Continent? [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]

Kat says torture in South English Legendary is horrific, likely because real torture was not allowed under English law until Henry VIII. [about 19 hours ago from Twitterrific]